member of:Observers of the Interdependence of Domestic Objects and Their Influence on Everyday Life

This group has been active for a long time and has already made some remarkable assertions which render life simpler from the practical point of view. For example, I move a pot of green color five centimeters to the right, I push in the thumbtack beside the comb and if Mr. A (another adherent like me) at this moment puts his volume about bee-keeping beside a pattern for cutting out vests, I am sure to meet on the sidewalk of the avenida Madero a woman who intrigues me and whose origin and address I never could have known...--Remedios Varo

(Artwork by Remedios Varo)

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.--Franz Kafka

Monday, February 28, 2011

“They made profound bows before her [the Cat] and said: ‘We all wish you to divulge your secrets for our benefit.’ The grand old cat answered: ‘Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own.’”

--From The Swordsman and the Cat (from a seventeenthcentury master’s book on swordplay; my source: Book ofSymbols, p. 300).

(photo by Arturo Ghergo)

Leonor Fini’s life began almost immediately as a creative, theatrical endeavor of clever attempts to thwart the terrifying incursions of a shadowy force. When she was barely a year old, her mother fled the oppressive ogre of her husband and his Buenos Aires to take her infant to her own homeland of Italy. But the distance was not enough; her father, his ego slighted, sent agents across the ocean to snatch her off the streets. Leonor remembered the moment, thankfully interrupted by attentive strangers, well into the last years of her life, when she recounted it to Philip Wells : “I was walking down the street in the perfectly normal vertical position of a child moving, and suddenly I was taken in someone’s arms and found myself in a horizontal position. This frightened me very much, and the fear stayed with me for many years after. As a child I felt constantly in the shadow of some dark obscure menace.”(Sphinx, The Life and Art of Leonor Fini)

She couched that dark menace in mythic, but manageable, terms, as “one of those spirits from Assyrian bas-reliefs: terrifying, implacable, and very bogus, all at the same time” (Sphinx). And instead of hiding away inside, she went about her childhood passing as a boy until she was five or six years old. This habit of pretending to be someone else turned from a necessity into a favored past-time, well-fed by the yearly carnivals and masked pageants of her town. As an adult, she was famous for her costumes—both the ones created for theater and ballet and those she created for herself, which she wore to any event she could find. “To dress up is to have the feeling of changing dimension, species, space. You can feel like a giant, plunge into the undergrowth, become an animal, until you feel invulnerable and timeless, taking part in forgotten rituals…I have always loved—and lived—my own theatre…To dress up, to cross-dress, is an act of creativity” (Sphinx, The Life and Art of Leonor Fini).

Above photo by Eddy Brofferio

Above photo by Andre Ostier

Horst

Another childhood difficulty she turned into magic was a temporary but lengthy blindness, suffered in her teens. For two months, Rheumatic conjunctivitis left her with her eyes bandaged, and the images that filled her mind were turned into marionettes and sculptures as well as paintings in a flood of activity as soon as the bandages were removed. Her obsessive focus, coupled with her expulsion from school, led to her mother’s concession to her daughter’s artistic dreams (Women as Mythmakers).

Timpe, Timpe, Timpe Tare

Voyage sans amarres

Le Carrefour d'Hecate

As a child, Leonor lived in a large household, with her mother, her grandparents, an uncle, a governess, a servant and, most importantly, a white Angora cat. Her close relationship with Cioci the Angora was the first of many, and as an adult, Leonor preferred to live this way—with many people, and with even more cats; at one time as many as 23 Persian cats shared her home and her bed.

Chats a Cornes

Visage

Cats have always played a significant role in art history; recently Sapphire wrote a fabulous post on traveling cat-painters of the Edo period in Japan who would go door to door selling paintings of cats to rat-proof the home. These paintings were to serve as protection for the hours of the day when the real-live cats were out patrolling other territories. She shows many lovely Ukiyo-e prints of cats in the post. Much later, in England, a little black kitten guided Alice into the world beyond the Looking Glass and back again.

French Cat Devil from Life Magazine

("Underneath the fanciful feline mask above is a Parisian surrealist painter named Leonor Fini who is also known for her passion for weird hats, skeletons and Persian cats. In headdress and bright red satin gown, Leonor attended an artists' ball in Paris on June 19 as an eye-catching cross between a cat and a devil." from the magazine Life, July 12, 1948)

In her review of the history and meaning of cats in art history in The Book of Symbols, Kathleen Martin says: “From the moment they [cats] first emerged from the wild and forged their wary affiliation with human beings, they have largely defined the terms of their self-domestication.” This power of self-definition may be where the symbolic importance of cats in Fini’s work finds its source: both in the general social arena, where women were pretty heavily domesticated second-class citizens, and in the Surrealist arena [which Fini emphatically refused to completely identify with], where females were permitted only the two roles of muse and femme-enfant, the desire to be one’s own woman, to grow into herself, and to forge relations with others as she saw fit must have been overwhelming.

Domestic? She’s sewing, but it’s magic…

And in fact, for most of her life, Fini lived with two men (though not always the same two): “one…who was rather a lover and another who was rather a friend. And it always worked” (Wikipedia). They would share her home with other friends and her, on average, 17 cats, all 17 of whom were given the respect they demanded: “They shared her bed and, at mealtimes, were allowed to roam the dining table selecting tasty morsels—and woe betide the guest who complained” (Wikipedia)…

According to Dorothea Tannin in Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, "You had to love Leonor a lot (I did) to put up with the cat miasma that accompanied whatever perfume drifted through her beautiful rooms on any given evening..." --an idea she connects to an amazing capacity for self-definition on the same page: "If ever there was a resolute 'dream world,' Leonor Fini lived there and managed, amazingly, never to leave it. In a conversation about a current movie...she said, primly, 'Kot'--one of her two male companions--'says I shouldn't see it. Ce n'est pas adapte a moi' (It isn't adapted to me).'"

Photo by Pilon?

Leonor, whose name means lion, who traveled Europe by car with 17 of her little lions… And lions, in Egyptian mythology, with their glorious manes, were representatives of the sun and the guardians of its rising and setting—and therefore of “the creative energies of dissolution and becoming” (Book of Symbols). Leonor created a whole series of her own Guardian paintings: tall, pale goddesses created especially for the task, often, of watching over destruction and creation. In La Gardienne des Fenix, a gorgeous woman in a flame-colored robe looks out over a wasteland, the fires of destruction, or sunset, or sunrise—it’s not clear—glowing from the distant horizon. She is surrounded by Phoenix of varying ages, from barely visible inklings of a future creature to the skeleton of a bird already passed.

La Gardienne des Fenix

And here, again, a Guardian, the very personification of the sun in her pale yellow gown budding forth beneath clear-sky robes, sits calmly in the midst of a destroyed landscape: she is an emerging sun in an emerging sky—she is life itself in the midst of death, re-creation. In each of these paintings, she holds the alchemical egg, a perfect sphere with everything that is needed for life tucked inside it:

Another major theme in Leonor’s painting was the Sphinx: half-cat, half-woman, often winged, sometimes not, this creature is a mysterious, incredibly flexible (unbreakable) guardian or sentry in its own right. Below, the full breasts and long, graceful neck of a woman grow out of a feline body—the face of a beautiful woman surrounded by a lion’s mane…

Etudie pour Portraits de Famille

Italy’s piazzas were full of stone, larger-than-life, triumphant female guardians in the guise of the caryatids holding up its formidable architecture and also sphinxes flanking entrances and gates. As a child, she often sat upon the Sphinxes Maximilian had brought from Egypt which guarded the entrance to Miramar Castle.

“Among the Egyptians, sphinxes were placed at the entrance of the temple to guard the mysteries by warning those who penetrated within that they should conceal a knowledge of them from the uninitiated. Champollion says that the sphinx became successively the symbol of each of the gods…which…suggests that the priests intended to express the idea that all the gods were hidden from the people, and that the knowledge of them, guarded in the sanctuaries, was revealed to the initiates only” (Wikipedia).

So again, the cat-like creature that guards the mysteries of our creation and our destruction, that guards mystery itself, shrouding it from the eyes of those unmotivated to the struggle “to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own.”

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

The cage of her body splits open, allowing the release of her soul into a purer form-- the first and second birds flower from her hair/branches; the third pushes through the now-vertical cage of her ribs. Though she is rooted, she is rooted in self, still free to transform. Remember, matter is neither created nor destroyed...it just changes form, it becomes so new, you don't even recognize it.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

"You have a Songbird that lives on the back of your head. It sings a song unique to you-- a song that reminds you of what you truly want to do with your life. You cannot see it, but you can hear it. You cannot prove the song to another, but you can feel the vibration of the music. Sometimes the noise from the outside world muffles the song or you play deaf because you are afraid to acknowledge it... And if you get too far off your path the Songbird will turn around and give you a brilliant, tough-love peck... it may even draw blood. It will do what it needs to in order for you to pay attention and remember."--Martique Lorray

Martique Lorray's artwork is alive, and always reminding you to be. There is a primitive sense to the creatures and images that's melded impeccably with a carefully-studied technique. The above songbird is painted on wood, and the bird seems to swirl out of a knot and into the woman's face. If I had looked closely enough at the bare wood, before Martique had painted onto it, could I have already seen this bird and this woman forming into each other?

"The Leaper is the courageous element jumping into the unknown. The Leaper lives in the forest. All of its senses are heightened--the ears are up, the eyes are wide, the body is extended. It is being led by its white, innocent hands, which will always navigate the Leaper through the darkness of the forest to its destination."

The Trickster-- A creature that makes you look twice, that teases you, that makes you think about what you saw, what you are seeing, what is real. Here, the horse looks twice at you...All of the above images are from Martique Lorray's portfolio entitled "Sexy Beast," which can be found among other portfolios on her website.

(Owl Eye, by Martique Lorray)

She creates something you haven't seen before, but something you recognize. Magic. And so it makes sense that amongst her paintings you would find this one, called Isis and Osiris.

Isis is a goddess of magic, "the matron of nature and magic" (Wikipedia). In fact, in the ancient Egyptian stories, she was able to use her magic to bring together the scattered bones of her murdered husband Osiris and breathe life back into them. This death and rebirth was ritualistically recreated every year in pre-Christian times, and her tears at his death were believed to be the reason for the seasonal flooding of the Nile. This story resonates still today, with the awful violence of "civilization" tearing us (one) into pieces and scattering the severed, wounded pieces far and wide across the world. Artists, writers, dancers, creators: these people put us back together, breathe life into us, and paint new doors in the walls for us to walk through into new worlds. Here, the two are nesting birds, symbols of transformation, transcendence....nesting in a verdant, fertile green...

Her newest portfolio, "The Weight Lifters," will be unveiled tomorrow night (February 4, 2011) at 6 at the Lark and Key Gallery (Southend) in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her oil paintings will be up until March 26th. She says of this new series: "When life gets hard, or heavy, that's when she sends them--the Weight Lifters. They can't solve, but they can relieve some of the burden for a time. They can't be seen, but they're close. When we sigh, that's a signal that they've attached. Pay attention. You can feel it. We don't realize how much there is to soothe."

This is art at its finest: somehow both primal and studied, and always leading the viewer to the best of him/herself.

Investigate Your Dreams

Friends and Artists

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

"Everything leads me to think that, in the near future, reality will be considered exclusively as a mere state of depression and inactivity of the mind"--Salvador Dali